Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  Watching himself, he was surprised that he had been so good. He was a little old for the part (he was supposed to be a boy of nineteen in the picture, just out of high school), but somehow he had caught the slippery movements of a complicated adolescent emerging, in fits and starts, into maturity. He was funny when he had to be and pitiable when he had to be and he seemed to be looking within himself at all times and dragging out of himself, with pain and with laughter, the accurate report on himself.

  He hadn’t remembered that he had been that good. After that he had been as good again only in the two other pictures he had made with Delaney, and his memory of himself from that time was overlaid with recollections of worse performances under other directors. This was Delaney’s best picture, too, made when he was in his prime, confident of his luck and savagely scornful of everything in the world but his own talent, before he had begun to repeat himself, before the many wives, before the big money and the interviews and the troubles with the income tax.

  When the climax of the picture came, the scene at night at the railroad station, shadowy and deserted in a lonely drizzle, when the boy appeared out of the murk to wait with the woman he had loved for the train which was to take her away and out of his life, Jack forgot that he was in a foreign city, five thousand miles and more than twenty years away from the buried innocent America of small-town railroad stations, of distant whistles across plowed farm lands, of lighted diner windows, Negro baggage handlers, old taxis waiting, dripping in the rain, with their drivers’ smoking cigarettes in the darkness and speaking in flat, desultory, unlovely voices of baseball scores and women and hard times.

  Caught in the sorrow of the fictional moment on the screen, watching the scratched old print, listening to the uneven sound track as the two lovers walked slowly down the platform, appearing and reappearing in the dim patches of light of the spaced station lamps, hearing the half-sentences of heartbreak and farewell, he was no longer conscious that it was himself he was watching, doing an actor’s job, no longer conscious that it was a woman he had lived with and who had been false to him who walked brokenly, for a last, despairing two minutes, beside the boyish shadow on the screen. For that moment, he was that age again, and he knew what it was like to be young and bereft in a place like that. And he felt, all over again, with all its old trouble, the powerful and endless desire for the body of the woman whose image, full and youthful and untouched by time, appeared and reappeared under the station lamps, the desire that he had thought had vanished forever in betrayal and recriminations and divorce courts.

  When the lights came up, he sat silently for a moment. Then he shook his head, to clear away the past. He turned to Delaney, who was slumped in his seat, his hand up to the earpiece of his glasses, looking tough and bitter, like an old catcher who had just lost a close game.

  “Maurice,” he said gently, loving him, and meaning what he said, “you’re a great man.”

  Delaney sat without stirring, almost as if he hadn’t heard Jack. He took off the heavy, thick-rimmed glasses and stared down at them, symbol of pride outraged, vanity at bay, of vision clouded and distorted by age.

  “I was a great man,” he said harshly. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Despière was waiting on the sidewalk outside the theatre. When he saw Jack and Delaney coming out with the last stragglers from the audience, he hurried over to them, beaming. “I saw it, Maestro,” he said. “Jolissimo. The tears still flow from my eyes.” He threw his arms around Delaney and kissed him on both cheeks. Sometimes it amused Despière to behave like a Frenchman on the stage. Two or three of the people who had been in the theatre stared curiously at the three men, and Jack heard a girl say, “I bet it’s him,” and knew, as usual, that he had been half recognized. “You must tell me just how it felt to be sitting there,” Despière was saying, “after all this time, watching reel after marvelous reel pass by.”

  “I won’t tell you a godamn thing,” Delaney said, pulling away. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to eat. I’m hungry.” He peered out into the street, looking for the car and the driver.

  “Delaney,” said Despière, “you must learn to be more charming to your admirers among the journalists.” He turned to Jack and held him affectionately by the arms. “Dottore,” he said, “I had no idea you were so beautiful when you were young. My God, Dottore, how the girls must have dropped.” Despière spoke Italian, English, German, and Spanish, aside from French, and when he was with Jack in Italy, he paid tribute to the manners of the country by calling Jack Dottore. In France, it was Monsieur le Ministre, in ironic recognition of Jack’s diplomatic status. “Weren’t you overflowing with pride of yourself in there tonight?” Despière gestured toward the theatre.

  “Overflowing,” Jack said.

  “You don’t want to talk about it?” Despière said, surprised.

  “No.”

  “Imagine that,” Despière said. “If I’d made that picture, I’d walk up and down the streets of Rome with sandwich boards on my back, announcing, I, Jean-Baptiste Despière, am totally responsible.”

  Despière was a nimble, slender man, his narrow, rectangular shape disguised by nipped-in suits with padded shoulders that had clearly been made for him in Rome. His face was sallow and brilliantly alive, with a cynical, narrow French mouth and large, luminous gray eyes. His hair was black and cut short and worn brushed forward in a style that came from the cafés of St.-Germain-des-Prés. It was hard to judge his age. Jack had known him for more than ten years and he hadn’t seemed to have grown a day older in that time, but Jack guessed he was somewhere in his late thirties. He had lived in America, and while his accent was unmistakably French, he had soaked up a good deal of American slang, which he used knowingly and without affectation. He had been in the Free French Air Force during the war, after escaping to London at the time of the surrender, and had served as a navigator in a Halifax, in a squadron that had been sent to Russia. He had come back from Russia with a ruined stomach, and he was constantly inquiring, especially of Americans, for a cure for ulcers which would not interfere with his drinking. He was a successful journalist and worked for one of the best magazines in France, but was always in debt, partly because of his carelessness with money and his easy generosity, but also because for long periods at a time he refused to work. He knew where all the restaurants were, and who was in what town at what time, and the first names of all the pretty girls of the crop of the current year. He was invited everywhere and given inside information by cabinet ministers and staff officers and movie stars and he paid his way with his wit and high energy and he had a surprising number of enemies. The car drove up and they all got in. Delaney didn’t ask them where they would like to eat, but growled out the name of a restaurant and then subsided in his corner. He was silent and didn’t seem to be listening to either Despière or Jack all the way to the restaurant.

  “Chaos begins at the top,” Despière was saying, across the table, in the quiet restaurant. “In the big, official buildings, with the statues of Reason and Justice and ancient heroes in the halls. Where would you find a private citizen foolish enough to attack the Suez Canal without any reserve of oil?” He chuckled happily. “One day’s fighting and they had to ration gasoline for a year. You have to be carefully selected by your fellow citizens to run a government to be able to be that splendidly idiotic. The most inept of kings, let us say Louis the Sixteenth, would never have pulled off a master stroke like that. Or maybe it is only France…” He shrugged. He looked around him with pleasure at the other diners. “Ah,” he said, “you have no idea how enjoyable it is to sit in a restaurant and be reasonably sure nobody will throw a bomb through the front door.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Delaney asked. He had been sullen and untalkative, drinking his wine and picking lightly at the plate of pasta in front of him and crumbling bread-sticks absently on the tablecloth.

  “In the last five years,” Despière said, eating with relish, “I’ve been in Korea, Ind
ochina, Cyprus, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, Egypt. I am like a doctor in an ambulance. I run to all emergencies.”

  “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days,” Delaney said.

  “Maestro,” said Despière, “brutality is your chief charm.” He smiled benignly, his teeth strong, squarish, tobacco-stained, behind the thin lips. “The last time was in Philippeville about six months ago. Three Arabs drove past in an open taxi and machine-gunned a fashion show.”

  “A what?” Jack asked, incredulously.

  “A fashion show,” Despière poured himself another glass of wine. “Eight beautiful girls showing the latest French dresses. That is how one liberates one’s country these days.”

  “What the hell were they doing in Philippeville?” Delaney asked.

  “Bringing the Paris message to our overseas possessions,” Despière said. “Chic for all occasions. Teas, sieges, Communist rallies, ambushes, state dinners, parades by the Foreign Legion, receptions for visiting American statesmen…They just drove past the front of the hotel and sprayed away. Imagine the corruption of the mind of a man who would shoot eight beautiful girls.”

  “Did they hit any of them?” Jack asked.

  “No. But they killed six people sitting in a café next door.”

  “How about you?” Delaney asked. “Were you really there?”

  “I was there. On the floor, behind a table,” Despière said, smiling. “I am getting very quick at dropping behind tables. It would not surprise me if I was told I held the world’s record. I was also present in Casablanca when the crowd poured gasoline over two gentlemen they didn’t like and set them on fire. I am highly paid,” he said, “because I have a knack of being on the spot at those moments when modern civilization expresses itself in a typical manner.” He held his glass up and looked at it critically. “I do like Italian wine. It’s’ simple. It is what it is. It does not pretend to be velvet like French wine. I also like Italian colors. When I saw the color of the walls of Rome for the first time on a summer morning, I knew I had been longing for the city all my life, although I was only seventeen at the time. I recognized the city from the beginning. The first time I came to Rome, with my father, when I was a boy, I entered the city through the Flaminia Gate, into the Piazza del Popolo. There were hundreds of people all over the piazza. My father stopped the car and took me to a café on a corner for coffee. The prettiest girl in the world was behind the cashier’s counter, selling those little tickets you give to the man who works the espresso machine. I sat there, in love with the girl behind the counter, and I said to myself, immediately, ‘What a wonderful place to live, surrounded by Italians. I will come here to drink coffee for the rest of my life. I have found the city for me.’ There are cities that your soul recognizes at first glance. Am I right, Dottore?” He turned to Jack.

  “Yes,” Jack said. He thought of himself and the first time he had seen Paris, during the war, and the pull that the city had exerted upon him, so that, finally, much later, he had come to live there.

  “There are some men,” Despière said, “who can only live fully in the capitals of countries not their own. I am one of them. You, Dottore, I suspect, are another. The happy exiles. The Maestro, now.” He squinted at Delaney, whose mood had improved somewhat during Despière’s recitation. “The Maestro is a different animal. He is invincibly American. That means he is brusque, careless, constantly worried, and uneasy when he finds himself living among people who are not constantly worried.”

  “Balls,” Delaney said, but he was smiling.

  “He has given us a typically charming response,” Despière said. “On the subject of cities. New York. I could live happily in New York, too. Although I think any American who manages to live there must end up with a crippled soul. What we need,” he declaimed with a wide sweep of his hand, “is an interchange of cities. A city should be regarded as a university—open to qualified and serious students, to be lived in for four or five years for the knowledge to be gained from it—and then to be left for other places—and to be revisited from time to time for brushing up on certain subjects and for sentimental reunion. In Paris,” he said, grinning, “I brush up on comedy and intrigue and camouflage and despair. In Rome on wine and love and architecture and atheism. When I am an old man, I intend to settle on a farm near Frascati, drinking the white wine, and each time I feel the approach of death, come into the city and have a coffee on the Piazza del Popolo…” He stopped and looked across, puzzled, at Jack. “What’s the matter, Dottore?”

  Jack was sitting with his head bent over his plate, his handkerchief up to his nose. He was rocking a little on his chair and the handkerchief was slowly turning red. “Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He stood up, blinking his eyes because he couldn’t see very well. He tried to smile. “Sorry. I think I’d better go home.”

  Despière jumped up. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  Jack waved him back. “I’d rather you wouldn’t,” he said. He started out of the restaurant, gagging, trying not to throw up, walking uncertainly, feeling the sweat come out on his face, not answering the headwaiter when the headwaiter said something to him on the way to the door. Outside, he leaned against the building, breathing deeply of the night air, tasting blood.

  I’m never sick, he thought, with an edge of panic, I’m never sick, what’s happening? He had an ominous feeling of change, of crossing over from one season to another, of a cold current suddenly flowing through him, of being exposed and vulnerable to accident. Standing there shakily, feeling the blood wet on his lips, his head tilted back against the cold stone, he had a dreamlike sense of events, words, people being translated into numbers and being put down in a long row of figures and the figures being added up mysteriously, endlessly, by an invisible, noiseless, unstoppable machine. If only I were drunk, he thought, I’d know I’d get over this in the morning. But he had only had half a glass of thin wine. Not velvet, he thought. Chaos begins at the top. Where is the man who hit me? “Arrivederci, Roma,” he heard the man’s voice singing, drunken and mocking. When the Doria went down.

  He shook his head and the bleeding stopped, as suddenly as it had begun. Now he felt the cold night air reviving him. He wasn’t dizzy or nauseated any more, just weary and hazily apprehensive, and he had to open his eyes very wide and take deep, conscious breaths to reassure himself that he was not on a station platform on a wet night, saying good-bye.

  He started walking back toward the hotel, pacing slowly, forcing himself to think about taking one step after another and making serious decisions about such things as curbstones and keeping from being run over and whether or not to buy a newspaper at the lighted kiosk on the street corner.

  He heard high heels coming up behind him and a woman passed him on the sidewalk and he saw that it was the German whore from the bar. Hamburg, he remembered, and the large reddened hands. Lewdly, he reflected on the nature of the business the red hands had been involved in that night. The woman was wearing red shoes. She was walking fast and she gave the impression of being angry, as though the night had disappointed her. Another number in the addition.

  He went into his hotel. From the bar downstairs came the sound of a radio playing a song he had never heard before. Upstairs, the corridors of the hotel were long and silent and dimly lit and the travelers’ shoes outside the doors were like the last personal effects of people who had been executed that afternoon at cocktail time.

  He passed twenty doors. There was not a sound coming from behind any of them. The guests, locked in, safe with their unchanging names and undivided lives, slept secretly, not divulging their positions. There were no red shoes before any of the twenty doors. He made sure of that.

  He forgot the number of his room and for a moment stood stupidly in the middle of the hushed corridor, overcome with the feeling that he would never find it again. Look for the room with a bloodstained jacket hanging in the wardrobe. No, he remembered, the old lady is cleaning it. Per pulire, per favore, Do
ttore.

  Then he had a brilliant idea. He looked at his key. There was a big plastic tag to which the key was attached and on the tag there was a number. 654. He was favorably impressed with his wisdom and the cold and logical precision of his thinking processes. He traveled cleverly down the corridor, avoiding both walls, and stopped in front of 654. He had the feeling that he had never been there before, but that he had been at another door, marked with the same number, and that significant transactions had taken place there. Night clerks, making their nighttime errors. Where had the other door been? In what city? New York, Los Angeles, London? There was the smell of laurel and eucalyptus, tropic and medicinal, about 654. Beverly Hills, he remembered, Delaney’s town. Delaney’s punishment, with the fog coming in from the Pacific, and a girl in a convertible late at night and a dog in the back seat that kept barking, the bared, carnivorous, California fangs of love.